For bush leagues, it's all in the family

Playing your father’s game with your father’s name is still very big in the bush, if the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Cootamundra Bulldogs Rugby League Football Club and the naming of its home ground are any indication.

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On the day the ground became the Les Boyd Oval after the former Wests and Manly international, his son, Grant, led the local team to an unexpected victory over a strong Wagga team.

A feature of the centenary dinner was the selection of fathers and sons in the club's Team of the Half Century, raising the question this Mother's Day and NRL Women in League round whether the female line has anything to do with it.

The focus on dynasty dads ignores the reality some families are genealogical powerhouses, football Jurassic Parks.

Geoff Carr, the recently retired chief executive of the ARL, says: “Everyone knows ‘Choc’ Mundine is the son of Tony but the best female athlete I saw as a kid growing up in Grafton was Tony’s sister, Rachel.

Les Boyd remarked during the Cootamundra evening that the best winger he saw as a kid was Eric Robinson, an indigenous player with South Sydney in between appearances for various bush clubs.

Boyd was surprised to learn from Brian James, an international winger who played for Souths and St George, that Robinson’s son is Ricky Walford, the former Dragon’s winger and an employee of the NSWRL.

James attended the Cootamundra function to honour his father, Jack, a tall second-rower with the 1929 Cootamundra Bulldogs.

Coota had the Bulldogs mascot 60 years before Canterbury changed from Berries.

The sons of former Cootamundra Bulldogs now play in the NRL.

Aaron Gray, a centre for South Sydney, played in the NSW Under-20s team which beat Queensland during the representative weekend.

His father, Brian, was a Cootamundra centre, as well as being captain-coach of Junee in 1986 when they beat Young in the grand final via a field goal by a 16-year-old kid named Laurie Daley.

There was a moving moment when a now deceased forward, Bernie Walsh, was named in Cootamundra's best team of the past 50 years and his wife, Aileen, came on the stage to accept the award.

She then kissed all the other players, including her son, Gerard, who was named halfback in the team. His son, Jake, played for the Sharks.

During the evening, I chatted with a number of now-retired school teachers who had been captain-coaches at various bush postings.

They had been transferred around one-teacher schools in the country and signed up with local teams, winning premierships from Lismore near the north coast to the Victorian border.

Like Paul “Woody” Field, who helped organise the Cootamundra evening and was one of the last men to play State of Origin from NSW Country, these players rejected opportunities to sign with Sydney clubs, remaining loyal to the bush and their careers.

Most of those one-man schools are now closed and women represent such a high percentage of teachers that many boys will complete their primary schooling without ever seeing a male at the front of the classroom.

This trend corresponds with the increasing age partitioning of society in which the passing-on of knowhow from fathers to sons is rapidly vanishing.

At Cootamundra, a women's rugby league game was played as a curtain-raiser.

The play was structured and the skills commendable.

If some of the female players are local teachers, or junior coaches, or future mothers, maybe Cootamundra’s Team of the Next Half Century will depend less on famous fathers and more on gifted women.